I guess poor people really have a lot of control over Wal-Mart, eh?
They have enough control to make them quit selling Maxim magazine. And they have enough control to make them keep selling Grand Theft Auto. You are underestimating exactly how many poor people do shop at wal-mart, and how much money they actually spend there. If the majority of them want something from wal-mart, wal-mart will do whatever it can to provide it.
I wasn't saying that ethanol was the solution to our problems as you seem to be implying. What I said was that the earth is not a closed system and you can't use 2nd Law arguements on it.
This discussion is really about one thing. Our consumption of gasoline. I don't think that one gallon of gasoline contains more energy than it cost to produce either, but we still use it. And we use it in engines that are at best 30-40% efficient. So moving from an energy storage device of hydrogen from an energy storage device of gasoline probably doesn't actually hurt us as much as you're implying. Both take energy to produce. The difference is that gasoline depends on oil, a non renewable resource. Hydrogen does not. Gasoline burns dirty. Hydrogen does not. It seems the strikes are piling up against gasoline.
Well, the rich saudi's have trillions of dollars. They can afford to leave. That leaves the 369 other million people to suffer... sounds like a great situation we've created.
But the money is never going to go away... we've given the saudi's trillions of dollars... it's not like they spend it as fast as they get it, or they stuff it in a mattress. The royal family has trillions of dollars invested in our stock market. I don't forsee any time in the future where they won't be able to control their populace.
well there is the small fact that they have trillions of dollars invested in our economy... what do you think they're doing with all the money we're giving them stuffing it in mattresses?
That may be true... people may not want anything smaller than a honda civic... but that doesn't mean we can't improve fuel economy. Tell me, does the civic really need a 10% boost in HP every few years? do you think maybe instead that could be a 10% boost in fuel economy? Do you think a cadillac escalade really needs 400HP? do you think fuel economy would imporve it only had 250HP?
Solar power? Nuclear Power? Wind Power? I'm pretty sure it takes more energy to produce one gallon of gasoline than the actual energy contained in it (and that would assume our cars are 100% efficient at extracting it), but that doesn't stop us from using it.
Impose a decent tax on gas, the price should quadruplicate at least. It will look the same if they decide to introduce metric at the same time (a gallon is about 4 liters);-). Notice this is not only cost-free, the State actually gets money - and it works perfect to discourage excessive car usage!
They don't have to tax gas... just stop subsidising it. The main reason gas is so expensive in europe isn't because they tax it more, it's because they subsidise it less.
Impose Punishing and Painful(R) taxes on low-efficiency cars, like those SUV gas-guzzlers, especially Humvee-like trucks; if you want the freedom to fart CO2 like a power plant, then pay for it!
Again, just stop subsidising them. Make all the fuel economey standards and emissions standards the same for all vehicles. The only reason SUV's are as cheap as they are are because they don't have to meet the same standards as cars.
That's the way things work in this great country of ours. The government takes our money in taxes to provide us with cheap gas and cheap food. Due to the ineffencies of the system some of that money is going to be loss. Leading to the conclussion that we would have more real wealth if they just left the market alone.
No. It isn't. Then why is it so expensive? Because of the energy needed to grow the plants ( do you know how much fuel is used in farming?) and the energy needed to produce the ethanol from the plants. See the second law.
Why don't you tell the weeds in my yard that the 2nd law says thay can't grow because no one is giving them energy. That would save me the trouble of expending energy to halt their growth.
The earth is not a closed system. The sun pumps in tons of energy to the earth. Plants convert it into other forms of energy and grow. Sure right now it might take more energy to make ethanol from corn than is currently stored in the ethanol, but we can make the process more efficient. That's what the whole arguement is trying to make our energy production as efficient as possible.
That simply isn't true. If every car was using a hydrogen fuel cell, we would still be generating the hydrogen from electricity made by burning fossil fuels. However, it is much more effiecent to do this in large power plants with scrubbers than on millions of small ICE's around the globe.
Re:No difference for a long while, but...
on
The End of the Oil Age
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But burning coal actually releases as much radiation into the air as you get nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant. The upside to the nuclear power plant is that you can contain it... good luck containing all the polution coming out of the coal burning plant.
If you really think about it though, it wouldn't be raising taxes. It's simply doing away with the subsidies that are on gas currently to keep it cheap. You're being taxed right now so that you can have cheap gas.
I guess you're confused by what he said... we wouldn't be rasing taxes on petrol. We'd actually just be decreasing the subsidies. Thanks to Uncle Sam, your gas is cheap. If he slowly stopped subsidising it the cost would increase...
Exactly! Notice I never said it was illegal to do this, I just questioned the legality. INAL, and I'm no expert at copyright. This could be considered fair use, or it could be a DMCA violation, I don't know. I do know that I don't want to be a guinea pig.
And this has what to do with the fact that Apple won't give you a free copy of the file if you lose it, just like a music store won't give you a free copy of a CD if you lose it?
Dude, read the parent. I only said this because he said if I scratched my CD I was out of luck. My point was that both systems require you to make backups to be safe. If you read what I said, I even stated that I make backups of my CD's.
. I like record stores. But I get weird looks from the help there when I ask them if I can rip open the packaging so I can listen to 30 seconds of each track like I can on iTMS;-).
That's probably because they're confused. At my record store they let me listen to the whole damn thing, not just 30 second clips. They have listening stations with all the newest releases avaliable to listen to in their entirety (200+ albums). They let you carry any used CD directly over to a bank of CD players to listen to. And if you ask them nicely they will let you open a CD to listen to it, especially if they know you and you're the kind of person who's likely to buy something.
99.9% of all DVD players have SPDIF out, and they are slowly replacing CD players... so most CD players will soon have SPDIF out. but that doesn't change the fact that if a CD will play in a CD player you will be able to get the music off of it, that's just the way red book works.
When/If the recording industry ditches CD's for DVD Audio or SACD, we got other problems. First those are super high quality and multichannel formats, it remains to be seen whether consumers will embrace this. But SACD supports a red book audio layer that is compatible with regular CD players so once again you can get your music.
You don't actually have to burn a CD, just a virtual one (i.e. a CD that only exists in RAM). Tne RIP that into MP3's. And if you don't like having to click a couple of times, write an AppleScript to automate it.
You only addressed half the problem. You still loose audio quality.
That's what backups are for. Luckily you can fit 200 tracks on a CD-R, so the cost of backing up is, oh, 0.05 cents per track?
So why is it ok to have to back up you're tracks, but not your physical CD's? I back up my physical CD's, so this is a moot point.
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I guess poor people really have a lot of control over Wal-Mart, eh?
They have enough control to make them quit selling Maxim magazine. And they have enough control to make them keep selling Grand Theft Auto. You are underestimating exactly how many poor people do shop at wal-mart, and how much money they actually spend there. If the majority of them want something from wal-mart, wal-mart will do whatever it can to provide it.
I wasn't saying that ethanol was the solution to our problems as you seem to be implying. What I said was that the earth is not a closed system and you can't use 2nd Law arguements on it.
This discussion is really about one thing. Our consumption of gasoline. I don't think that one gallon of gasoline contains more energy than it cost to produce either, but we still use it. And we use it in engines that are at best 30-40% efficient. So moving from an energy storage device of hydrogen from an energy storage device of gasoline probably doesn't actually hurt us as much as you're implying. Both take energy to produce. The difference is that gasoline depends on oil, a non renewable resource. Hydrogen does not. Gasoline burns dirty. Hydrogen does not. It seems the strikes are piling up against gasoline.
Well, the rich saudi's have trillions of dollars. They can afford to leave. That leaves the 369 other million people to suffer... sounds like a great situation we've created.
But the money is never going to go away... we've given the saudi's trillions of dollars... it's not like they spend it as fast as they get it, or they stuff it in a mattress. The royal family has trillions of dollars invested in our stock market. I don't forsee any time in the future where they won't be able to control their populace.
well there is the small fact that they have trillions of dollars invested in our economy... what do you think they're doing with all the money we're giving them stuffing it in mattresses?
That may be true... people may not want anything smaller than a honda civic... but that doesn't mean we can't improve fuel economy. Tell me, does the civic really need a 10% boost in HP every few years? do you think maybe instead that could be a 10% boost in fuel economy? Do you think a cadillac escalade really needs 400HP? do you think fuel economy would imporve it only had 250HP?
Solar power? Nuclear Power? Wind Power? I'm pretty sure it takes more energy to produce one gallon of gasoline than the actual energy contained in it (and that would assume our cars are 100% efficient at extracting it), but that doesn't stop us from using it.
Impose a decent tax on gas, the price should quadruplicate at least. It will look the same if they decide to introduce metric at the same time (a gallon is about 4 liters) ;-). Notice this is not only cost-free, the State actually gets money - and it works perfect to discourage excessive car usage!
They don't have to tax gas... just stop subsidising it. The main reason gas is so expensive in europe isn't because they tax it more, it's because they subsidise it less.
Impose Punishing and Painful(R) taxes on low-efficiency cars, like those SUV gas-guzzlers, especially Humvee-like trucks; if you want the freedom to fart CO2 like a power plant, then pay for it!
Again, just stop subsidising them. Make all the fuel economey standards and emissions standards the same for all vehicles. The only reason SUV's are as cheap as they are are because they don't have to meet the same standards as cars.
That's the way things work in this great country of ours. The government takes our money in taxes to provide us with cheap gas and cheap food. Due to the ineffencies of the system some of that money is going to be loss. Leading to the conclussion that we would have more real wealth if they just left the market alone.
No. It isn't. Then why is it so expensive? Because of the energy needed to grow the plants ( do you know how much fuel is used in farming?) and the energy needed to produce the ethanol from the plants. See the second law.
Why don't you tell the weeds in my yard that the 2nd law says thay can't grow because no one is giving them energy. That would save me the trouble of expending energy to halt their growth.
The earth is not a closed system. The sun pumps in tons of energy to the earth. Plants convert it into other forms of energy and grow. Sure right now it might take more energy to make ethanol from corn than is currently stored in the ethanol, but we can make the process more efficient. That's what the whole arguement is trying to make our energy production as efficient as possible.
That simply isn't true. If every car was using a hydrogen fuel cell, we would still be generating the hydrogen from electricity made by burning fossil fuels. However, it is much more effiecent to do this in large power plants with scrubbers than on millions of small ICE's around the globe.
But burning coal actually releases as much radiation into the air as you get nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant. The upside to the nuclear power plant is that you can contain it... good luck containing all the polution coming out of the coal burning plant.
If you really think about it though, it wouldn't be raising taxes. It's simply doing away with the subsidies that are on gas currently to keep it cheap. You're being taxed right now so that you can have cheap gas.
I guess you're confused by what he said... we wouldn't be rasing taxes on petrol. We'd actually just be decreasing the subsidies. Thanks to Uncle Sam, your gas is cheap. If he slowly stopped subsidising it the cost would increase...
I was actually talking about my SlimX, which is a CD based MP3 player
Exactly! Notice I never said it was illegal to do this, I just questioned the legality. INAL, and I'm no expert at copyright. This could be considered fair use, or it could be a DMCA violation, I don't know. I do know that I don't want to be a guinea pig.
And this has what to do with the fact that Apple won't give you a free copy of the file if you lose it, just like a music store won't give you a free copy of a CD if you lose it?
Dude, read the parent. I only said this because he said if I scratched my CD I was out of luck. My point was that both systems require you to make backups to be safe. If you read what I said, I even stated that I make backups of my CD's.
. I like record stores. But I get weird looks from the help there when I ask them if I can rip open the packaging so I can listen to 30 seconds of each track like I can on iTMS ;-).
That's probably because they're confused. At my record store they let me listen to the whole damn thing, not just 30 second clips. They have listening stations with all the newest releases avaliable to listen to in their entirety (200+ albums). They let you carry any used CD directly over to a bank of CD players to listen to. And if you ask them nicely they will let you open a CD to listen to it, especially if they know you and you're the kind of person who's likely to buy something.
99.9% of all DVD players have SPDIF out, and they are slowly replacing CD players... so most CD players will soon have SPDIF out. but that doesn't change the fact that if a CD will play in a CD player you will be able to get the music off of it, that's just the way red book works.
When/If the recording industry ditches CD's for DVD Audio or SACD, we got other problems. First those are super high quality and multichannel formats, it remains to be seen whether consumers will embrace this. But SACD supports a red book audio layer that is compatible with regular CD players so once again you can get your music.
I agree... this is very sad. I forget that not everyone can listen to KEXP in their car like I can.
You don't actually have to burn a CD, just a virtual one (i.e. a CD that only exists in RAM). Tne RIP that into MP3's. And if you don't like having to click a couple of times, write an AppleScript to automate it.
You only addressed half the problem. You still loose audio quality.
That's what backups are for. Luckily you can fit 200 tracks on a CD-R, so the cost of backing up is, oh, 0.05 cents per track?
So why is it ok to have to back up you're tracks, but not your physical CD's? I back up my physical CD's, so this is a moot point.
I thought the main driver of e-commerce was price? Isn't that why amazon took off, because it was cheaper? Not because it was more convinient.
Of course double albums seem to be 19.99... and I usually pay about 17.99 for them in the brick and mortar store.
Call me old fashioned, but I get a kick out of whole porn movies too :) I love the movie Latex!
The solution to this is easy. By music from artists who care enough to put out a quality album. They're not hard to find if you look.